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Letter from the HFTP Global President: At the End of the Year, We Reflect on the Best of the Year

Members Only: 2018 HFTP Compensation and Benefits Report

By Tanya Venegas, MBA, MHM, CHIA. Results to the biannual survey conducted by Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP). Information includes data on compensation and benefits trends for finance and technology professionals in the club and lodging industries.

IT Spending in the Lodging Industry Three-year Analysis: 2015–2017

By Agnes DeFranco, Ed.D., CHAE; Arlene Ramirez, CHE, CHAE; and Tanya Venegas, MBA, MHM, CHIA. PART II: An analysis of IT spending data in the lodging industry based on reporting in the new USALI Schedule 6 — Information and Telecommunications Systems.

B2B companies are usually familiar with event sponsorship. Conferences are sponsored by vendors, and many businesses find sponsorship a highly effective way of increasing brand recognition and driving leads.

Business that rank among the top three in Google's local search results tend to have more reviews and a slightly higher average star rating than businesses that rank in the fourth through tenth positions, according to recent research from BrightLocal.

There are over 300,000 active bots on Facebook's Messenger platform, Facebook reported earlier this year.
And with 8 billion messages being exchanged between customers and businesses every month, chatbots are now an essential part of any customer service and marketing strategy.

It's winter, the time many companies begin to ramp up for the biggest industry events of the year in January, February, and March. In Q1 alone, for example, retail businesses have NRF's "Big Show," tech companies have CES, and the digital music, marketing, and entertainment crowds converge on Austin for SXSW.

Many of us make the mistake of treating LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, as simply an online Rolodex or a glorified CV, rather than an inbound marketing channel that can be optimized for sales inquiries.

A common fallacy regarding email programs is that they are self-sustaining. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Your email marketing demands regular maintenance: Consistent attention and a persistent desire to create a more meaningful connection between brand and customer are prerequisites to a profitable email program.

The hottest SEO trends for the year ahead… You knew this article was coming. Some of these trends you've already seen this year, and some are new, but we can definitely expect to see more of all of them in 2019.

With so many websites available for people to talk about your brand—Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, ZocDoc, Bing, TrustPilot, industry-specific review sites, and on and on—managing your brand's online reputation can seem impossible.

When someone has a hot-sauce habit, he knows when that extra zing of impact just isn't there. On the other hand, many live their entire lives without ever opening a bottle of Cholula. They accept that their meal is as good as it gets, that there's no new dimension of flavor within reach—because it's what they're accustomed to.

Brands send a lot of email in November and December—far more than any other time of the year. Which makes sense: consumers are primed to buy, and the holiday season is huge for many brands' bottom line. Last year, we witnessed the greatest industrywide annual increase in holiday online shopping revenue and website visits in the history of online shopping. According to predictions, the 2018 holiday retail season is poised to eclipse 2017's.

The term "creativity" in marketing organizations conjures up a different image for everyone. Some people associate it with brainstorming sessions, others with staff retreats involving crafts or games. Still others think about "creativity" in relation to the collection and presentation of data.

People today are completely bombarded by messaging via a growing number of media and platforms—TV, smartphones, Internet ads, social media, billboards—that it's hard to measure. But the modern consumer sees thousands of ads a day. Even places that used to be ad-free (e.g., gyms), no longer are.

Blogging is not what it was 10 years ago. Getting a blog post to rank in Google is becoming increasingly difficult. YouTube has changed a lot as well: Getting videos to rank on the platform is not as easy as it used to be.

"Storytelling" has become such a hot topic that it's almost a buzzword, except that the term still has meaning. The definition of storytelling, though, encompasses much more than text—it's about customer experience, "micro-moments," and the sharing of meaningful stories using all sorts of formats.

A recent article by Ken Gaebler introduced readers to "intent data" as a concept and explained how to go about purchasing it from third-party providers. In a word, intent data is an actionable dataset for B2B marketers that enables them both to understand what new leads and current prospects want and to serve the most optimal content, message, or product across owned Web and email channels.

Marketing organizations are on a quest to become more data-driven. As a result, they use, on average, about 16 different technology platforms—but only a few organizations reap the full value of their investment.